Businesses that are in the market for customer acquisition – Start-ups
Once you have created a marketable product, the first step is to develop a solid customer acquisition strategy. It is vital to have the correct plan if you want to achieve long-term, sustainable growth. For those start-ups, your marketing budget would probably look like 80-90% marketing in acquiring new customers.
Begin planning for a new user or customer acquisition with these percentages in mind. This necessitates audience segmentation, goal formulation, and omnichannel marketing, along with the Freemium model.
With that said, why is it critical to have a client acquisition strategy in place from the start? Isn’t it possible to focus solely on marketing your start-up to achieve exponential growth?
“Freemium” plans have been a popular technique for tech start-ups and app developers to recruit new customers during the last decade or so. The idea is that if people test a bare-bones version of your service for free, or if they use a free version until they reach a specific number of users, they’ll realise how fantastic it is and pay you to use the version with all the bells and whistles.
Some do not see the benefits of this strategy. The general argument is that it is hard to make money by giving away items for free, that free users aren’t quality consumers, and that they take an inordinate amount of resources. All of this is correct. At least if free isn’t part of a larger plan.
My company provides its products in two forms: freebies with premium purchases. My clients have also tested a few different approaches, such as free plans with limited capabilities, 30-day free trials, and their current offering: a free plan that allows customers access to everything we have to offer with certain limitations (for example, whether campaigns are white-labelled or how much data we’ll save).
- Customers who already have an appetite for your service or product are easier to please, including enhanced brand recognition.
One approach to attracting more users is by providing the service free of charge for a short period. It’s something every business does! It gets results.
Research has shown that you can profit from it. YouTube, for example, offers a free service but monetises its content with adverts. Furthermore, if your users enjoy your (free) product, you will eventually notice increased brand awareness, leading to increased profitability.
- Customers who are easy to work with and a greater awareness of the brand
Providing the service for free is one of the simplest strategies to gain more consumers. All practise it! They even devised a method to profit from it. YouTube, for example, offers a free service but monetises its content through adverts. Furthermore, if your users enjoy your (free) product, you will see an increase in brand awareness, which will lead to increased profitability.
- Researched based and a powerful way of Customer Engagement.
This one-of-a-kind business approach also gave birth to a new notion known as Newtonian Engagement. The name is a play on Isaac Newton’s first rule of motion, which claims that “An interested player of a freemium service will remain engaged until moved upon by an outside force.”
It may sound to you like this is a crazy idea, it is the reality. Customer Engagement is a primary motivator for freemium services, typically games, apps, streaming, online publications. A bit like try before you buy.
- Product feature testing without risk
A well-planned Freemium deal provides hundreds or thousands of free users for your product or service. Implying that you have some leeway regarding the features you can test with your audience.
For example, you can design a very rudimentary version of a new feature of your app or service and see if your free users like it – all without worrying about if they’ll cancel if it doesn’t work as intended. You can also do low-cost tests to message or email your free users, pitch a feature, and see what piques their interest.
- Testing Product Referral Programs
Accessing a larger group of free users can also be advantageous in testing referral programmes and gaining new users. For example, no matter how wonderful a referral programme is, it takes time to perfect. Furthermore, if you are constantly running experiments to entice your paying customers to share your product, they may become irritated and discontinue their service.
On the other side of the coin, having free users allows you to try various referral schemes scientifically. Thus, referrals could be an efficient marketing channel that comes at the marginal cost of sustaining free users if all goes well. You have an excellent referral programme and five times as many free users as premium customers.
- When done correctly, the freemium business model helping brands and businesses attract substantial traffic to your websites.
Providing customers with a “try before you buy” experience that overcomes user resistance to purchasing. Thus, converting the free users to paying customers.
Dropbox is an expert in this model. The company boasts 500 million registered customers, each of whom receives two gigabytes of free storage space. When they reach that limit, consumers are given the option of upgrading to one terabyte for a monthly or annual subscription charge. Dropbox produced $1 billion in income in 2017 from 11 million paying individual and business users using this approach, and it continues to grow its user base.
- Beauty Industry Free Product Promotion
Sending out free samples to clients who are already warm leads is an excellent approach for promoting your skincare products and services.
It’s an opportunity for those warm leads to provide your brand with input on what consumers like and dislike about the freebie. In addition, brands can use this research base to try things out, and if they enjoy them, users will be more likely to tell their friends about them – and another win-win situation for businesses!
Offering a product or service for free is the ideal approach to attract more clients. Even if most of these consumers will not usually progress to the premium stage, they work like a magnet to attract more prospective premium customers.
This brand or business model is explicitly based on the network effect, a business phenomenon. According to the network effect, an outstanding service gets more valuable as more people use it. Specifically, the greater the number of individuals who use the product or service, the greater its value.